SACRAMENTO, CA – California’s new law—Proposition 36—allowing tougher prosecution for retail theft starts Jan. 1, and Sacramento law enforcement agencies claim they will take a “measured approach” by focusing on organized crime, not people who “shoplift out of desperation and poverty,” according to a story in the Sacramento Bee.
The Sacramento Bee notes, “Proposition 36, which won support from two-thirds of California voters, allows prosecutors to charge defendants with a felony if, over time, they’ve stolen goods worth more than $950, and sets up a treatment-focused court process for those accused of drug crimes.”
The Sacramento Bee explained the measure was approved as “part of a backlash to a previous law, Prop. 47, which decreased penalties for numerous non-violent crimes, by voters in 2014.”
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho, Sheriff Jim Cooper and County Supervisor Rich Desmond, all “supported the measure,” wrote the Bee.
Prop. 36 also “punishes some theft-related crimes with time in state prison instead of county jails, and allows law enforcement to warn people arrested for fentanyl offenses that they can be charged with murder if someone dies after taking the drug” according to the Sacramento Bee.
The Sacramento Bee wrote “as the new law takes effect, Ho and Cooper said they plan to distribute stickers and cards to retail businesses showing that they are protected under the new law, an effort they said would help deter crime and make merchants and shoppers feel safer.”
However, the Bee added, “the new law does not come with new funding for law enforcement, but the two said they would find the resources to combat organized retail theft and fentanyl distribution” via “cards (which) will include a QR code that shoppers can use to learn about the new laws on the District Attorney Office’s website.”
Desmond told the Bee, “We’re not going to criminalize addiction. We are going to use this as an opportunity to help people” and notes “low-income neighborhoods where retailers experience a higher level of crime would benefit if theft was reduced, because merchants would be able to stem their losses and may not have to lock up so many items.”
The Sacramento Bee also wrote, “Cooper, a Democrat who previously served in the Legislature, said the law’s passage was a pivotal step toward reversing what he contends were overcorrections by Prop. 47. Of 1,000 people arrested in theft-related crimes over the past year, only 12 were homeless” with many “taking advantage of what he called ‘lax’ laws on retail theft.”
